February is a good month for staying indoors and keeping warm, although this has been – so far – a remarkably warm winter. On BBC Radio 4 this morning they said that it had been the warmest winter for eighty years. So that means around 1934-5 it must have been even warmer. I’d never read that the mid 1930s were particularly warm. On the other hand, much of the United States seems to have been having a quite exceptionally snowy winter. My niece in Massachusetts has been valiantly shovelling several feet of snow repeatedly off paths, while a Facebook author friend, who has just moved to Georgia, has posted pictures of deep snow at his new home. Here on the east coast of Scotland we’ve had a few inches of snow for one day and a few frosty mornings, and that has been the extent of our winter. Now the snowdrops are out in profusion, with the leaves of crocuses and daffodils showing through: